AlumNEWS
SPOT
19 70s
GHT
It didn’t matter if she was standing still, Jean Robinson G.O. ’74 was always going places. As a sixth grader, she decided she was going to be a news reporter, and she wasted no time in making that dream a reality. At Glen Oak, she worked on the school newspaper, wrestling up interviews with celebrities and politicians.
In 2021, as the communications and multimedia specialist for Euclid Public Library, Jean still explores unchartered territories this time through virtual reality. Before she joined the library as its first video producer, the library had about five videos in its online collection. Backed by Jean’s expertise, it now has hundreds.
When presidential candidate George McGovern visited Jean’s neighborhood in the 1970s, Jean nabbed an interview with him at the back door of a bowling alley. She wasn’t even old enough to drive.
Jean has taken library visitors on virtual trips to Anne Frank’s experience in hiding, inside Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night,” and even the Apollo 11 moonwalk.
By now, Jean’s career spans decades as a writer, producer, video editor, and news reporter. As an award-winning video producer, she worked in broadcast journalism for 13 years before pursuing a lifelong dream to produce documentaries. Working for United Church of Christ National Headquarters, Jean traveled around the world with missionaries to report on their work. “Making documentaries was the most exciting part of my career,” she says. “I worked with a crew in China that didn’t speak English, traveled with a ‘marked’ woman in Mexico, and surveyed earthquake damage in Haiti. International reporting opened my eyes to cultures, people and events throughout the world, deepening my perspective.” 36
NI
LI
ALUM
Who’s Doing What, When and Where
“The virtual world tricks your mind into thinking you’re really there,” Jean says. “You’re practically leaving the world behind.” As a Glen Oak student, Jean learned that anything was possible. It fostered in her big dreams. “When teachers are telling you that you can do anything, it makes you think that you can go out and be on TV,” Jean says. “They said,
‘Shoot for the stars. It could happen.’ And largely because of that, it did.”
